Kurt Angle certainly made his millions in WWE but had to start at the lower end of their pay scale after initially snubbing the company’s contract offer.
Now retired and with his final wrestling matches very much behind him, Angle is rightly remembered as one of the greatest WWE stars ever.
His wrestling fame, however, came off the back of heroics in the Olympics where, in the 1996 Atlanta games, he won a gold medal in amateur wrestling – with a broken neck.
Interest from the ‘professional’ wrestling world of WWE soon followed, with Angle having gone on record saying he and his agent initially scoffed at the idea of joining the industry when they laid a lucrative contract at his door in 1996.
The Angle Slam master would eventually fall in love with wrestling, though; consumed by its characters, energy and athleticism. Hooked on watching Raw in 1998, he admitted to contacting WWE to see if the offer remained on the table. It didn’t.
As such, Angle had to do things the harder way on route to his eventual on-screen debut at the 1999 Survivor Series.
“I called up WWE and asked them if that contract from 1996 still stood,” explained the star to SI.
“They said: ‘No, because you didn’t come up and try out.’ I figured nothing in my life’s ever come to me easily, so I’d go up and try out.
“So I went up and tried out and after the first day, I’d picked up on everything so quickly that they offered me a contract, but the contract was only $75,000, and let me tell you: that’s not a good contract.
“If you’re [in] pro wrestling, the only thing they pay for is flights. They don’t pay for your hotel, your rental car, your food, your tolls – none of that stuff they pay for. I had to pay for it.
“I’m on the road 250 days a year and I’m paying for that with only $75,000 a year? It doesn’t work.
“So I had to bunk with people, I had to rent cars with people, I was living a poor life as a pro wrester when I started out.
“But in my rookie year I did so well that, by the end of that year, I’d made over a million dollars… I wasn’t struggling that long!”
Angle was quicky in the money in WWE having bagged multiple championships and main events inside 12 months. It was at that point he knew the time was right to press for more.
He went on: “What they did, after my first year. I said: ‘I want a new contract’ and because I was world champion at the time, they had to make my wishes come true.
“They gave me the one million guarantee, that was the highest guarantee back then, now they have higher cases. Back, then, there were only a handful of people.”
Earning a minimum downside of $1 million took Angle into a very unique bracket and one only occupied by top stars like Stone Cold Steve Austin, The Rock, Triple H and The Undertaker.
Austin in particular, says Angle, had a very clear understanding of how to make more, and maximised the in the best way possible – merchandise.
He explained: “That’s your guarantee, but if you wrestle full time, you wrestle at all the house shows, the TVs, and the pay-per-views, plus your merchandise, you can make up to three, four, five times your guarantee.
“It all depends on who you are and what you’ve accomplished. Someone like Stone Cold Steve Austin was making $16 million a year. He was at the top of the heap of anybody, because [he] sold like $13 million a year on merchandise.
“He did extremely well.”
Angle wrestled for WWE until 2006 before returning in 2017, briefly as an authority figure before eventually wrestling again.
His final match came at WrestleMania in 2019, a losing effort to Baron Corbin.
